Maus 2 Literary Analysis

The graphic novels Maus and Maus II by Art Spiegelman bombard the reader with a vivid account of the WWII Nazi Holocaust as told from the perspective of a Jewish father (Vladek Spiegelman) to his troubled Jewish son (the author). I find that that the author’s troubled perspective seems to stem from an inherited sensitivity to the violence of the Holocaust era symbolized by the swastika, which is cleverly used as a logo for Adolf Hitler on the cover of both books. It is my argument that the author uses animals as metaphorical representations of the human characters to frame the sensitive nature of the acts of violence performed by Nazis against the Jewish as “bestialities.” On the one hand, the Jewish characters are portrayed as little mice,
Strategic use of mice to depict the prisoners who, after being left in the wilderness, traveled in one direction and another, works to convey the idea of fright and confusion. Subsequently, their dialogue is subjective to circumstances like a small, collective mouse and the story’s narrative is inspired with minuscule sentiments of hope like “Maybe we can get food at any one of these farms.” After the scattering, Vladek was picked up on the road he was walking by another group of Nazis on patrol. A Nazi cat appears suddenly with a gun pointed at Vladek and barks, in his traditional feline growl, “HALT!” The author is equally strategic in this deployment of the cat metaphor, in this case, to make a vivid depiction of the Nazis as the tormentor and instigator of long suffering. An illustration at the end of this page shows them boarding a long line of Jewish prisoners into a barn. Could this line could be taken as a death sentence if rationalized in terms of “bestialities”? During this sequence, it is to the author’s advantage to use cat and mouse metaphors because he captures the idea that the Nazi cat is batting the Jewish mouse around in his paws, denying safety or freedom to its pray with one impeding movement to